David Berkowitz recently posted an article on Social Media Insider that, in exactly 906 words, called Google+ dead in the water. While his perspectives are interesting (and at times, entertaining), they’re flawed. This service has yet to be fully released to the public. Calling this platform irrelevant and bereft of life is premature, at best.

Let’s be honest, adding another social media platform into the mix may be a bit overwhelming for some. Managing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, etc. can be exhausting, and initially I too questioned the demand for another major hitter to enter the game. I was wrong. Everywhere I turned, there was someone pleading for an invite.

This begs the question: Why is everyone so eager to hop on the Google+ bandwagon? Well, it depends. However, here are a few common reasons:

Remaining relevant by keeping up with social media as it evolves.

The desire to be a social/digital pioneer. It’s human nature to want to be first.

The social media reboot. Sometimes it’s healthy to want to leave all of your former high school classmates behind and start over.

Whatever the reason may be, the end result is the same. People WANT this service and they’re flocking in droves to get there.

Berkowitz’s main flaw is that he’s stuck in an old mentality that is deeply rooted in the principles of abandonment. This made perfect sense during the infancy of social media. People left LiveJournal and Friendster and flocked to MySpace. After a couple really good years for MySpace, everybody migrated over to Facebook.

Fast-forward to the present. The Age of Abandonment is now over. Integration is the new black. Generally, people are not leaving Facebook for Twitter and people are not leaving Twitter for LinkedIn, or FourSquare. Instead, we’re bringing all of these different tools together and are leveraging their power collectively to tell a more complete story about who we are.

I don’t believe that Google+ was developed to be a replacement to any one of the aforementioned services. Rather, it’s meant to be a compliment to what we already have. I say let’s give this thing a chance.